Here comes another Castlevania TAS, on the same day. Did I see this coming? I didn't. :P
  • Emulator Used: Bizhawk 2.2.2
  • Genre: Metroidvania
  • Takes damage and dies to save time, MASSIVELY
On Aug 27, 2018, Burb discovered a wrong warp in FDS Castlevania 2 that allows the player to skip to the final boss from early game and made a testrun that beats the game in 05:59.824. This run uses the inputs from that run for the first 90 seconds. Hence I made this movie.

Version Choice

This run is done on the very first release of Castlevania 2, on Famicom Disk System. This run is made possible by two of its exclusive glitches. Another important differences is that the height of Simon's jump while whipping is slightly lower than how it is on the NES releases; because of this, the wrong warp and certain damage boost featured in the NES run cannot be done on the FDS version.

Jump Animation Cancellation

If you use your whip during a jump and the animation of the whip ends exactly when you land, 1 frame is skipped by canceling the landing animation. However, due to how easy it is to create lags in this game, this trick isn't used too often in this run since it only saves time when using the whip doesn't generate any extra lags at all.

Day-night Transition Skip

Remember the infamous staple of this game? You can skip it on FDS version by entering the next screen on the exact same frame the in-game clock reaches 18:00 or 6:00. This glitched is used around 2:57 in this movie to skip the first and only day-night transition. However, this essentially created a bottleneck since I would need to wait for the clock to reach 18:00 before triggering this screen transition. Therefore, lag-reduction is the top priority before this point since there is time to spare.

Loading Sequence Death Warp

Reducing HP to 0 during a loading sequence triggers a wrong warp, as seen around 3:13 in this run. I tried to trigger a day-night transition skip and a death warp at the same time, but this seems to be impossible. Another option was to make the day-night transition happen right after the loading sequence, but it turned out to be slower than skipping the day-night transition. I can't just let the day-night transition happen while Simon is in the monochrome glitch town either becausethat would cause the universe to explode.

Subterranean Death Warp

If you exit a town after doing a floor drop without waiting for the camera to catch up, you will enter the void beneath the next map and die. Usually, you will simply respawn in the town, but for unknown reasons, you can warp to glitched maps from certain places on FDS version. FYI, the monochrome glitch town takes you to a different place than the normal Town of Ondol does, and the combination of these two death warps is therefore necessary for getting into the final castle.
A friendly reminder: If you sit through the credits and go back to the save file selection screen, you will notice that all save files are corrupted and you can't even delete them. In other words, the game becomes practically unplayable at this point. Therefore, it's probably not a good idea for you to perform this glitch on actual FDS hardware! :D

Special Thanks

  • Burb: for discovering this wrong warp route that allows skipping the majority of the game and jump animation cancellation for minor optimization.
  • Producks & Koh1fds: for posting information about the death warp on the forum. Koh1fds was actually pretty close to finding this specific route to the final boss.
  • zggzdydp: for the run on NES version.
  • YOU, for reading the submission text and watching the movie.

Memory: Judging
Memory: Changing branch name to warp glitch per guidelines.
Memory: Delaying to implement improvements per this post.
Memory: Updating with 311 frame improvement and resetting to judging underway.
Memory: With the updated file, this seems fairly optimized.
feos has confirmed here that the ending does play as normal despite the corruption of saves. We don't have any rules against leaving the game in an unplayable state after beating it, just that the ending does indeed play.
This movie got a very positive rating, however given how much gameplay is cut from this branch and the high enough ratings for the existing movie, I believe this deserves a separate branch altogether.
Accepting to Moons as a new branch.
fsvgm777: Processing.


TASVideoAgent
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Memory
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This run uses the inputs from that run for the first 90 seconds.
Why? EDIT: Shouldn't you include that person as a coauthor?
[16:36:31] <Mothrayas> I have to say this argument about robot drug usage is a lot more fun than whatever else we have been doing in the past two+ hours
[16:08:10] <BenLubar> a TAS is just the limit of a segmented speedrun as the segment length approaches zero
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definitely some great stuff, also wtf is going on after the death warp? lol
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I'm assuming the submissions comments mean August 27, 2018, because September 27, 2018 doesn't exist yet. Either way, it's neat to see that this glitch does in fact have the potential to go to Drac's Castle! I've been following the thread since it was first brought up and have been curious about it. Very nice discovery. Good work to everybody involved! Yes from me.
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Man, that glitched world stuff was seriously impressive. Definite yes vote.
Burb
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I'll add that after the wrong warp on the eye enemy where you end up in the glitched town and do a floor drop from within the wall, you do a screen scroll/transition before the camera catches up to you. This will put you under the intended screen and kill you (a quirk that exists in the NES version as well) The game will then respawn you at the last ground tile you touched. The magic here is that in between these two screens in addition to just a normal loading screen there's also a disk swap happening. So when the game attempts to put you back in town it glitches further and puts you in a glitched map just under the bridge to Dracula's castle. At least that's what I think is going on. I found this by pure luck as I was curious where it would respawn you if you did that. Luckily for us, it was a location of great benefit.
Post subject: Did I see this coming? I slept ~10 min before and missed :p
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First, Zelda, now, this one! (FDS games) Castlevania III has managed a warp glitch w/Grant before, now, another milestone reached! What a broken strategy to watch. Yes vote for me.
My homepage --Currently not much motived for TASing as before...-- But I'm still working.
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I would like Game Mechanics Explained to do an overview of this new glitch. Yes vote.
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It seems like this TAS was initially started with a version of the Nintendo FDS BIOS that was converted to the iNES format. However, the TAS syncs just fine on the actual (raw) Nintendo FDS BIOS and the Twin Famicom FDS Bios (cf. temp encode).
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I saw again (with a bit more of attention), and this time, I have 2 questions: 1 - After bought the holy water, on the same room, the jump was necessary to manipulate something? 2 - Also I noticed that the pause, doesn't acess holy water instantly like the published run. Was to avoid lag during the fall or something?
My homepage --Currently not much motived for TASing as before...-- But I'm still working.
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FWIW, there are RTA runs that perform the same death warp, but 1) the graphics aren't corrupt post-death warp (no lines everywhere). 2) They all load from an Everdrive. 3) None of the runs show the save slots.
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Challenger wrote:
I saw again (with a bit more of attention), and this time, I have 2 questions: 1 - After bought the holy water, on the same room, the jump was necessary to manipulate something? 2 - Also I noticed that the pause, doesn't acess holy water instantly like the published run. Was to avoid lag during the fall or something?
Both of these are flaws, actually. 1. I think that was to manipulate the value of Y-subpixel for the first floor drop. However, it should be faster to do it in the overworld instead of in the room, if it is necessary at all. 2. Burb pressed LEFT to select the holy water, which creates a few more lag frames than it would if RIGHT was pressed. Admittedly, it was my mistake to not check Burb's inputs for the first 90 secs of the game more carefully, and up to 10 frames could be lost from these two mistakes themselves. However, given how many entropy-related lags there are in this game, especially for this route, they should have little to no net effect on the length of the run in the end. (Fixing them causes the whole run to desync, BTW.)
fsvgm777 wrote:
FWIW, there are RTA runs that perform the same death warp, but 1) the graphics aren't corrupt post-death warp (no lines everywhere). 2) They all load from an Everdrive. 3) None of the runs show the save slots.
1. In fact, Burb's testrun on Bizhawk 2.2.2 doesn't feature such heavy graphical corruption either. I don't know exactly what caused those lines to appear in my run, but my best guess is that this is because I entered the glitch world during day time since I skipped the day-night transition, while all those RTA runs enter the glitch world during the horrible night. 3. Burb told me that the same SRAM corruption happens to him on Everdrive as well, and he was able to prevent it by resetting the game before the end of the credits.
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Fortranm wrote:
1. In fact, Burb's testrun on Bizhawk 2.2.2 doesn't feature such heavy graphical corruption either. I don't know exactly what caused those lines to appear in my run, but my best guess is that this is because I entered the glitch world during day time since I skipped the day-night transition, while all those RTA runs enter the glitch world during the horrible night.
I can at the very least confirm that bit from my testing (on BizHawk 2.3). However, I seem to be completely unable to replicate the glitched world after leaving the glitch white town (and I also sometimes soft-lock in the town). Maybe it's because I don't perform a certain glitch with the whip (where you phase through the floor, shown at around 3:32 in the temp encode). What happens when I leave the glitch town the intended way (without any glitches): The game loads the area normally. Further testing will be needed.
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Fortranm wrote:
Challenger wrote:
I saw again (with a bit more of attention), and this time, I have 2 questions: 1 - After bought the holy water, on the same room, the jump was necessary to manipulate something? 2 - Also I noticed that the pause, doesn't acess holy water instantly like the published run. Was to avoid lag during the fall or something?
Both of these are flaws, actually. 1. I think that was to manipulate the value of Y-subpixel for the first floor drop. However, it should be faster to do it in the overworld instead of in the room, if it is necessary at all. 2. Burb pressed LEFT to select the holy water, which creates a few more lag frames than it would if RIGHT was pressed. Admittedly, it was my mistake to not check Burb's inputs for the first 90 secs of the game more carefully, and up to 10 frames could be lost from these two mistakes themselves. However, given how many entropy-related lags there are in this game, especially for this route, they should have little to no net effect on the length of the run in the end. (Fixing them causes the whole run to desync, BTW.)
How hard would it be to manually redo?
[16:36:31] <Mothrayas> I have to say this argument about robot drug usage is a lot more fun than whatever else we have been doing in the past two+ hours
[16:08:10] <BenLubar> a TAS is just the limit of a segmented speedrun as the segment length approaches zero
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Fortranm told me on discord he would be willing to work on the improvements next week and to set the submission to delayed if I felt necessary which I do.
[16:36:31] <Mothrayas> I have to say this argument about robot drug usage is a lot more fun than whatever else we have been doing in the past two+ hours
[16:08:10] <BenLubar> a TAS is just the limit of a segmented speedrun as the segment length approaches zero
Fortranm
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fsvgm777 wrote:
I can at the very least confirm that bit from my testing (on BizHawk 2.3). However, I seem to be completely unable to replicate the glitched world after leaving the glitch white town (and I also sometimes soft-lock in the town). Maybe it's because I don't perform a certain glitch with the whip (where you phase through the floor, shown at around 3:32 in the temp encode). What happens when I leave the glitch town the intended way (without any glitches): The game loads the area normally.
Yes, you do need the floor drop. There are actually two death warps during the sequence, and the second one requires dying underneath the map on the left of the town. I'll further elaborate the details in the submission text when I update the movie file.
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Fortranm wrote:
1. In fact, Burb's testrun on Bizhawk 2.2.2 doesn't feature such heavy graphical corruption either. I don't know exactly what caused those lines to appear in my run, but my best guess is that this is because I entered the glitch world during day time since I skipped the day-night transition, while all those RTA runs enter the glitch world during the horrible night.
Yes, the extra graphical corruption is exclusive to it being daytime after the warp. The same thing happens on everdrive if you do the transition glitch.
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http://tasvideos.org/userfiles/info/49964915146761997 The new run is done, and the submission text has been updated.
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So is it possible to avoid the corruption in the latest movie, by using a reset? Will it lose time, how much if so?
Warning: When making decisions, I try to collect as much data as possible before actually deciding. I try to abstract away and see the principles behind real world events and people's opinions. I try to generalize them and turn into something clear and reusable. I hate depending on unpredictable and having to make lottery guesses. Any problem can be solved by systems thinking and acting.
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If you mean avoiding the corruption of save files, you just need to reset after the movie is over. If you are looking for a way to prevent the game from becoming unplayable without taking actions after the movie is done playing, then AFAIK, there is none, because every time you save and reset, you are back to the starting location.
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Can anyone check the tracelogs of how the second quest starts normally, and compare it to how it fails to start after this movie? Maybe there's some address that can be tweaked to fix the startup?
Warning: When making decisions, I try to collect as much data as possible before actually deciding. I try to abstract away and see the principles behind real world events and people's opinions. I try to generalize them and turn into something clear and reusable. I hate depending on unpredictable and having to make lottery guesses. Any problem can be solved by systems thinking and acting.
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http://tasvideos.org/userfiles/info/50041396094599073 Here is a testrun done on Bizhawk 1.12.2 from Burb before the discovery of this warp. It shows how the game normally saves itself after the credits.
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I just did some testing to check where the save corruption happens, and it happens when you spawn in the glitched town. I reached that town, then went to the bottom floor and died in the water until I got a game over. Selected the bottom option (save & quit) and all save slots were corrupted. Then I made the eye death boost be a game over and save & quit before the game spawned me in town. And it did not corrupt the saves. Seems as if, as long as we appear in the glitched white town, the saves will corrupt the next time you save.
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Burb wrote:
I just did some testing to check where the save corruption happens, and it happens when you spawn in the glitched town. I reached that town, then went to the bottom floor and died in the water until I got a game over. Selected the bottom option (save & quit) and all save slots were corrupted. Then I made the eye death boost be a game over and save & quit before the game spawned me in town. And it did not corrupt the saves. Seems as if, as long as we appear in the glitched white town, the saves will corrupt.
Sounds to me this has nothing to do with game completion then and the ending itself actually plays out completely normally. There are no rules against bricking carts. For all we know some games may in fact brick themselves automatically through normal play and banning them would be silly.
[16:36:31] <Mothrayas> I have to say this argument about robot drug usage is a lot more fun than whatever else we have been doing in the past two+ hours
[16:08:10] <BenLubar> a TAS is just the limit of a segmented speedrun as the segment length approaches zero
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Fortranm wrote:
http://tasvideos.org/userfiles/info/50041396094599073 Here is a testrun done on Bizhawk 1.12.2 from Burb before the discovery of this warp. It shows how the game normally saves itself after the credits.
Doesn't sync on 1.12.2 for me. Everything in the movie header matches.
Warning: When making decisions, I try to collect as much data as possible before actually deciding. I try to abstract away and see the principles behind real world events and people's opinions. I try to generalize them and turn into something clear and reusable. I hate depending on unpredictable and having to make lottery guesses. Any problem can be solved by systems thinking and acting.